Breathing Fire: Canada's New Poets

A new generation of Canadian poets has come of age!

In this volume, award-winning poets Lorna Crozier and Patrick Lane present the work of 31 of the country's best young poets, including Michael Redhill, Karen Solie, Karen Connelly, Gregory Scofield, and Stephanie Bolster. "These are the writers who were born in the mid-1960s to 1970s," Crozier writes. "They are a large, precocious, ardent group of skilled and passionate writers, and they have a faith in the power of poetry to rekindle, redeem and renew. Without a doubt their poems are breathing fire."

Born in the sixties and seventies, these poets are the best of the new and the best of the young. They are the voices of the nineties, a decade that will bridge the millennium. Not since the early seventies when Al Purdy put together his Storm Warning anthologies has there been as audacious and provocative a collection of new poetry. The poets here are in your face and in your heart, celebrating poetry in all its exhilirating variations. What is remarkable are not only the new contexts and new stories, but how respectfully and joyfully the new writers have returned to the poets who wrote before them.

We have been waiting for this new generation. Their eloquent poetry speaks to our times, to who we have been and who we are about to be.

Lorna Crozier and her partner Patrick Lane are among Canada's leading poets. Crozier is the author of ten books of poetry, including The Garden Going on Without Us (1983), the Governor General's Award-winning Inventing the Hawk (1992), Everything Arrives at the Light (1995), A Saving Grace (1996) and What the Living Won't Let Go (2000). In 1995 she co-edited Breathing Fire: Canada's New Poets with Patrick Lane.

Patrick Lane, considered by most writers and critics to be one of Canada's finest poets, was born in 1939 in Nelson, BC. He grew up in the in the Kootenay and Okanagan regions of the BC Interior, primarily in Vernon. He came to Vancouver and co-founded a small press, Very Stone House with bill bissett and Seymour Mayne. He then drifted extensively throughout North and South America. He has worked at a variety of jobs from labourer to industrial accountant, but much of his life has been spent as a poet, having produced twenty-four books of poetry to date. He is also the father of five children and grandfather of nine. He has won nearly every literary prize in Canada, from the Governor General's Award to the Canadian Authors Association Award to the Dorothy Livesay Prize. In 2014, he became an Officer of the Order of Canada, an honour that recognizes a lifetime of achievement and merit of a high degree. His poetry and fiction have been widely anthologized and have been translated into many languages. Lane now makes his home in Victoria, BC, with his companion, the poet Lorna Crozier.

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The Canadian League of Poets has declared a
National Al Purdy Day!



Al Purdy was born December 30, 1918, in Wooler, Ontario and died at Sidney, BC, April 21, 2000. Raised in Trenton, Ontario, he lived throughout Canada as he developed his reputation as one of Canada's greatest writers. His collections included two winners of the Governor General's Award, Cariboo Horses (1965) and Collected Poems (1986)
and other classics such as Poems for All the Annettes, In Search of Owen Roblin and Piling Blood. Later in life, he travelled widely with his wife Eurithe and settled in Ameliasburg, Ontario and Sidney, BC. In addition to his thirty-three books of poetry, he published a novel, an autobiography and nine collections of essays and correspondence. He was appointed to the Order of Canada in 1983 and the Order of Ontario in 1987. His ashes are buried in Ameliasburg at the end of Purdy Lane.